1. Field of the Invention
The present general inventive concept relates a terminal apparatus to control a printing operation and a method thereof, and more particularly, to a terminal apparatus to control a printing operation, to select a filter for an extensible markup language (XML) paper specification (XPS) file, and a method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
The term “image forming apparatus,” as used herein, refers to an apparatus that prints printing data generated by a terminal apparatus such as a computer on a recording medium. Such image forming apparatuses may be photocopiers, printers, facsimile machines or multifunction peripherals (MFP) combining two or more functions of the aforementioned devices.
Recently, the image forming apparatus supports a direct printing function with respect to documents of PDF, TIFF, and JPG formats. The direct printing function refers to a function for directly printing a document simply by transmitting a file to the image forming apparatus without executing an extra application on a terminal apparatus such as a PC, a laptop computer, a PDA, and a digital camera.
As data for supporting such a direct printing function, a XPS file is exemplified. The XPS file, which is an electronic file of a fixed layout capable of maintaining a document template and of being shared with another file, organizes all resources necessary for a document or a job in a directory structure and packs data describing reference relationship among the resources using XML (extensible markup language) and the resources in a ZIP format. The XPS file has a logical structure of a tree shape having a plurality of layers as illustrated in FIG. 6.
FIG. 6 is a conceptual view to explain a logical structure of the XPS file.
Referring to FIG. 6, printing option information set in the XPS file is defined in a PrintTicket in the XPS file and has a hierarchical structure comprising a job level, a document level, and a page level. The document level and the page level may include a plurality of documents and a plurality of pages, respectively, and different printing option may be set for each document and each page. More specifically, the printing settings in the job level are applied to the whole job, the printing settings in the document level are applied to a corresponding document, and the printing settings in the page level are applied to a corresponding page only.
However, the image forming apparatus requires a higher level of resource in processing the XPS file than in processing data written in a conventional print description language (PDL). Therefore, an XPS driver, which is disposed in the terminal apparatus providing the XPS file, should include a XPS printer filter pipeline path to perform various pre-processes and transmit the pre-processed XPS file to the image forming apparatus, thereby reducing the load of resource to the image forming apparatus.
However, a user is not allowed to select a filter used in the XPS driver printer filter pipeline to perform various pre-processes and also cannot easily learn which pre-process has been performed.